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Abstract

Narrative measures derived from English and Russian tell and retell narrative
language samples of 20 L1-Russian, L2-English bilingual adults were correlated with
their overall, speaking and verbal proficiency self-ratings to verify the validity of the selfrating
scale for both languages. In English, measures of fluency, productivity and
grammaticality were moderately correlated with speaking proficiency self-ratings.
Strength of correlations with tell versus retell narratives varied by category of narrative
measure. For Russian, correlations were not significant due to ceiling effects in
proficiency. The effects of modifications to narrative measures were considered,
showing that correlations with temporal fluency and productivity increased as mazes and
fillers were excluded, while correlations with grammaticality increased as article
omission errors were excluded. Sources of variation in self-ratings and narrative
measures are described, and recommendations are presented for an alternative narrative
elicitation method.